IN THE QARA MOUNTAINS hama, Bilhaf, Bait ash Shaikh, Bautahara, Harasis, Afar, whom the people of Oman know collectively as Ahl al Hadara, a name possibly identifiable with the Hadoram of Genesis (by the elision of the final 'm' which is a Semitic form of plural and the article in ancient Sabaean) and the Adramitae of Pliny. Hadoram and Hazramaveth (generally equated with Hadhramaut) come together in Genesis and are called brothers, and Dhufar is contiguous to Hadhra- maut. , The Qara Mountains, geographically in the centre of this South Arabian ethnological enclave, seem to have afforded a natural asylum for aborigines or early settlers driven south and east before more virile peoples, or attacked from the sea. What a glorious place! Mountains three thousand feet high basking above a tropical ocean, their seaward slopes velvety with waving jungle, their roofs fragrant with rolling yellow meadows, beyond which the mountains slope northwards to a red sandstone steppe. Two incon- gruous aspects, but true at any point throughout the strip above the Jurbaib plain. Great was my delight when in 1928 I suddenly came upon it all from out of the arid (i) Shahari is spoken, by Qara, Shahara, Barahama, Bait ash Shaikh, (ii) Mahri by Mahra and Bilhaf. (iii) Bautahari by Bautahara. (iv) Harsusi (Aforit) by Harasis and Afar. Shahari is normally unintelligible to users of the other languages, who, however, can understand one another with difficulty. I was unaware that Mahri and Shahari had been written up by the German philologist Dr. Maximilian Bittner, working on material collected in th,e Hadhramaut and Socotra by Dn Miiller's Arabian Expedition (1902) and by Count Landberg's Expedition (1898-99). My Harsusi and Bautahari, which appear to be variants of Mahri, have never before, I think, been recorded. [48]